Publisher-Grade Analytics
at Indie Prices
How I'm co-founding and leading UX strategy for IndieForge — reframing how indie developers think about their own marketing, and building a platform that serves the game, not the market.
Indie devs are great at making games.
Marketing them is a different story.
Indie game developers are remarkably good at making games. They are, almost universally, uncomfortable with marketing them.
This isn't a skills gap. It's an identity gap. The tools that exist for game marketing were built for marketers — people who think in campaigns, funnels, and conversion rates. Indie devs think in systems, player experience, and craft. The language doesn't translate. The workflows feel foreign.
Most indie studios either ignore marketing until it's too late, or hand it off to someone else and lose the authentic voice that made their game worth playing in the first place.
The data exists — it's scattered across Steam, review platforms, social signals, and third-party tools. IndieForge pulls it together into a focused dashboard built for the solo dev or small studio. Not by teaching devs to think like marketers — but by building a platform that thinks like a dev.
From 80+ features to 2 that matter
Discovery generated a backlog of over 80 potential features. The first major strategic decision wasn't what to build — it was how to decide. I ran a priority matrix across the full feature set, evaluating each against user impact, technical feasibility, and MVP scope.
The result: two core feature areas anchored the MVP. Everything else was categorized as post-launch, deprioritized, or cut entirely. This wasn't just scope management — it was the decision that made the product coherent.
The reframe that changed everything
We went into early research with a reasonable hypothesis: indie devs struggle with marketing because the tools are too complex and the learning curve too steep. Simplify the tools, solve the problem.
That hypothesis was wrong — or at least, incomplete.
Through informal user research and stakeholder interviews, a different pattern emerged. The friction wasn't primarily about tooling. It was about identity. Indie devs weren't avoiding marketing because they couldn't figure out the software. They were avoiding it because engaging with it felt like becoming someone they didn't want to be.
Indie developers have emotional resistance to marketing as an identity — not just as a tooling problem. This distinction matters because no amount of UI simplification solves the core issue. If the platform feels like a marketing tool, it will trigger the same resistance, even if it's beautifully designed.
This reframe changed our design direction entirely. IndieForge doesn't need to convince developers to start doing something new — it needs to reframe what they're already doing and give it structure and visibility.
Every subsequent design decision — information architecture, interaction patterns, copy, feature prioritization — gets pressure-tested against this principle. If a feature makes the dev feel like they're doing marketing, it's wrong, even if it's technically correct.
Two weeks, one reframe, three artifacts
With the insight established, we moved into a two-week design sprint focused on user flows and core interaction patterns. I ran the full sprint — facilitating the workshops, synthesizing outputs, and keeping the cross-functional team aligned across design, engineering, and product strategy.
The sprint opened with a user flow workshop — a facilitated session mapping the full journey from first login through a first successful campaign artifact. Midpoint check-ins with our CEO Evan and engineer Steven kept design and engineering in sync. A progress memo at the midpoint surfaced blockers and documented decisions in real time. The sprint closed with a formal close-out report: what we validated, what changed, and what the next sprint must address.
The sprint produced three artifacts that now live as the design foundation for the product:
Facilitated session structure for mapping the full dev journey from first login through first campaign artifact.
Documents what was validated, what changed, and what the next sprint must address. A living record of design evolution.
Surfaced blockers, open questions, and decisions made — keeping async collaboration on track between sprint cycles.
The sprint also validated the core user flow for the Pre-Launch epic — the first of three product phases (Pre-Launch, Post-Launch, Growth and Scaling) that structure the IndieForge roadmap.
Three decisions worth explaining
Each of these decisions traces directly back to the design principle. They're small calls with large downstream effects.
Most marketing platforms open on performance data — impressions, reach, conversion. IndieForge opens on the game. The game's identity, its upcoming milestones, its story. Metrics exist, but they're not the hero. The platform orients around the game, not the campaign.
Standard SaaS onboarding asks "what are you trying to achieve?" IndieForge asks "tell us about your game." The goal-setting comes later, framed as serving the game's needs rather than the dev's marketing targets. The language difference is small. The psychological difference is significant.
IndieForge is an AI-assisted platform — but the AI is never foregrounded as a feature. It surfaces when it has something genuinely useful to contribute: a suggested press angle based on the game's genre, a timing recommendation based on the dev's stated capacity. It doesn't ask the dev to prompt it. It watches and offers. This keeps the experience feeling like a collaborator, not a tool.
How AI fits this work
IndieForge is an AI-assisted product — which means I'm not just a designer who uses AI tools, I'm a designer who has thought carefully about what AI should and shouldn't do in a product experience. That shapes how I use it in my own process too.
During sprint cycles, I use Claude and Cursor to prototype interaction concepts directly in code before moving to high-fidelity Figma. This isn't about skipping design — it's about testing the logic of an experience at low cost before investing in the visual layer. It surfaces edge cases and flow problems that wireframes miss.
For research synthesis, I use AI to help compress interview notes and surface pattern candidates — but the reframes that actually matter come from sitting with the tension in what people said. The insight that indie devs have emotional resistance to marketing as an identity didn't come from a summary. It came from noticing what people apologized for.
The principle we landed on — "IndieForge should feel like it serves the game, not the market" — is a human judgment. AI helped me get to the conversation faster. It didn't tell me what the conversation meant.
Co-founder, UX Strategist, Product Manager
I own the full design lifecycle — from research and information architecture through interaction design, sprint facilitation, and roadmap prioritization. This is not a client engagement. It is a product I am building, which means every design decision has to survive contact with real users, real technical constraints, and real business tradeoffs.
Defining and sequencing features based on user research, technical constraints, and business goals
Facilitating two-week sprints with clear goals, acceptance criteria, and retrospectives
Conducting interviews with indie developers to validate assumptions and surface real pain points
Keeping co-founders aligned on progress, blockers, and pivots
Writing specs, user stories, and decision logs to keep the team moving asynchronously
What IndieForge does
IndieForge is a marketing intelligence dashboard purpose-built for indie game developers. The core MVP feature set — distilled from 80+ discovery ideas:
Market position tracking
Monitor where indie titles sit in the Steam market relative to competitors in the same genre and price range
Audience intelligence
Understand who's actually buying similar games — demographics, platforms, play patterns
Review sentiment analysis
Surface trends in player feedback to identify what resonates and what's a dealbreaker
Wishlist and launch analytics
Pre-launch signals and post-launch data in one view, designed for solo devs and small teams
Road to MVP
Discovery & Scoping
Priority matrix reduced 80+ features to MVP core. Design system Ions layer established. HMW workshops completed.
User Flow Design
Onboarding and core flows workshopped. Emotional resistance reframe surfaced. Design principle established.
Design & Prototype
First testable dashboard version. Feedback loops with target users against finalized flows.
Build & Launch
MVP handoff and launch. Target: May 15, 2026.
Sprints complete — foundation validated
Planned sprint cycles to MVP
MVP target launch date
Active, in sprint
Sprints 1 and 2 closed with a validated foundation: design principle established, emotional resistance reframe confirmed, core user flows for the Pre-Launch epic documented. Sprint 3 moves into the first testable dashboard version with target user feedback loops.
Full case study results, flow diagrams, and launch analytics will be added post-MVP · May 2026
What 0→1 teaches you
The most important discovery wasn't a feature — it was realizing that the product's biggest barrier was emotional, not functional. That reframe changed everything.— On building IndieForge from zero
IndieForge is the project where every discipline I've built — research, strategy, design systems, stakeholder management, sprint facilitation — has to work together at once. There's no one to escalate to. The product direction decisions, the research synthesis, the team alignment — they're all mine to own.
Knowing what not to build is often harder than knowing what to build. This is the project where I learned that most concretely.